A Long Way From Chicago

by Richard Peck

  Grandma lived at the other end of town in the last house. She was sitting out in the swing on her back porch, though as a rule she kept busier than that. It almost looked like she was waiting for us.

  I came dragging into the side yard with Mildred’s horse behind me. And Mildred. I guess I was glad to see Grandma there on the porch. I don’t know. I was pretty near the end of my rope.

  Mildred dropped down and tied her horse to a tree. Grandma was on her feet now. The swing swayed behind her. At the foot of the porch steps I stared at the ground and said, “Mildred says I owe her a dollar.”

  “Do tell.” Grandma stroked her big cheek. She looked down at me over her spectacles. “You run up quite a big bill for your first day. A buck’s a week’s wages around here. Two weeks’ for a Burdick.”

  Mildred stood her ground behind me. I could feel her breath on my neck. She was tough. Not too bright, but tough.

  “Well, come on in the house,” Grandma said. “We’ll talk it over.” She turned back to the screen door. “Get them boots off.” She pointed to Mildred’s. “They’re caked with something I don’t want on my kitchen floor.”

  Mildred’s eyes flashed two colors. But Grandma was bigger than she was. She squatted to unlace her boots. Then she stood them by the back door.

  We went inside. Without her boots, Mildred had lost some steam. Her socks were more hole than cotton. This may have been the first clean kitchen of her experience. She looked around, wary. But not wary enough.

  “How about a glass of buttermilk to wet your whistles?” Grandma had been making cottage cheese. A big cloth sack of clabber dripped into a bowl. She waved us into chairs.

  I could take buttermilk or leave it. Mildred guzzled hers. It left her with a white mustache, and a little more of her authority slipped away. Grandma cut us two big squares of cold corn bread out of a pan.

  “How’s your Grandma Idella?” Grandma said to Mildred, friendly as anything. “I hear she’s had the dropsy and she’s too puny to get off the bed.”

  “She’s poorly,” Mildred admitted. “She’s pinin’ and fixin’ to give out.”

  “Poor old soul,” Grandma said. “I’ll get a jar of my huckleberry jam out of the cellar for her. I expect she can keep that down.”

  Grandma’s spectacled gaze grazed me as she sailed out the back door. She was up to something. She didn’t have to go outdoors to go down her cellar. The cellar door was right behind my chair.

  Mildred wolfed the corn bread, though she’d eaten Ina-Rae’s lunch.

  Grandma was soon back, without the huckleberry jam. I don’t remember her ever making huckleberry jam.

  “And is your paw still in the penitentiary?” she asked Mildred.

  “He was framed,” Mildred mumbled, sulky.

  “Oh, I guess them sheep off the Bowman farm found their own way into your pen.” Grandma stood at her ease before the black iron range. It was her usual spot. The linoleum there was worn to the floorboards.

  “Mildred’s paw’s a famous horse trader in these parts,” Grandma explained to me, “when he’s not in the clink. People still talk about how he sold that half-dead nag to Old Man Nyquist. Mildred’s paw fed a live eel down that plug horse’s throat. It was lively as a young colt for the time it took to sell it to Nyquist. Of course, when the eel died, that old crowbait nag lost all its get-up-an-go. Nyquist had to send it to the scavenger.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Mildred with her mouth full.

  But I was suddenly arrested by a sight that only Grandma and I saw. Mildred couldn’t see it. Her back was to the door. Her big gray horse was trotting away, past the porch, free as air. Tied around its neck were Mildred’s boots. I nearly fell off the chair in surprise. But Grandma gazed into space, seeming to count the cadavers on her flypaper strip.

  Presently she said to Mildred, “We’ll talk about that dollar another time. You better get on your way. You’ve got five miles of bad road ahead of you. You won’t be home till pretty nearly midnight.”

  Mildred looked up. Whatever she saw in Grandma’s eyes brought her out of her chair. It tipped over behind her. Mildred pounded sock-footed out onto the back porch. The horse was gone. When she grabbed for her boots, they were gone too. She tore off the porch, heading for the road, looking both ways. But the horse was out of sight. Grandma latched the screen door behind her.

  I’d never budged. Grandma righted Mildred’s chair and sat down, to take the weight off her feet. Her thoughts seemed to wander, and she was using a toothpick. Grandma carried a toothpick hidden in her mouth. She could flip it forward with her tongue to pick her teeth.

  At last she said, “Them Burdicks isn’t worth the powder and shot to blow them up. They’re like a pack of hound dogs. They’ll chase livestock, suck eggs, and lick the skillet. And steal? They’d steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke.”

  “Grandma,” I said, “you’ll get me killed. She wants a dollar off me. Instead, you untied her horse and slung her boots around its neck and she has to walk home.”

  “Barefoot,” Grandma said.

  “Grandma, tomorrow at school she’ll take it out of my hide.”

  “She won’t be in school tomorrow,” Grandma said.

  “I don’t see why not. She’ll ride to school tomorrow just to skin me alive.”

  “No, she won’t,” Grandma said. “That horse went home. I know that horse. It belongs to the Sensenbaughs. They live seven miles in the other direction, way over there past Milmine. A horse’ll go home if it gets the chance.”

  “You mean—”

  “Mildred’s paw stole every horse he ever had. And he won’t steal another till he gets out of the penitentiary. I don’t picture Mildred walkin’ five miles both ways for an education.”

  “. . . Barefoot,” I said.

  “Barefoot,” Grandma said. “I can’t fight all your battles for you, but I can give you a level start.”

  A silence fell while I thought that over. Then I said, “And you acted real nice to her too, Grandma. You gave her buttermilk and that big slab of corn bread.”

  “Oh well.” Grandma waved herself away. “Didn’t want to send her off hungry. I knew she had a long walk ahead of her.”

  We sat there at the kitchen table, Grandma and I, while the shadows crept across the linoleum.

  In this busy day I hadn’t had time to be homesick. But I thought about my brother. Joey. Always before, he’d come down here to Grandma’s with me, and stuck up for me. Now he was out west, planting trees, living in a tent. I thought about Joey, and Grandma was thinking about him too. I could tell.

  Then I smacked my forehead, remembering Bootsie. “Grandma! Where’s Bootsie?”

  “Who?”

  “Bootsie, Grandma. My cat.”

  “I won’t have a cat in the house,” she said. “They shed. She’s out in the cobhouse where she belongs.”

  I sank in the chair. “Grandma, she won’t know where she is. She’ll be scared. She’ll run away. She’ll try to go home like Mildred’s horse.”

  “No, she won’t,” Grandma said. “I buttered her paws.”

  “You what?”

  “I rubbed butter on all four of her paws. That’s what you do with a cat in a new place. By the time they’ve licked off all that butter, they’re right at home. Works every time.”

  “Oh, Grandma,” I said, too worried to stir.

  Now it was nearly evening. The sun setting down the west window glinted off Grandma’s spectacles. The toothpick made little lazy revolutions between her wrinkled lips. Something thumped out on the porch. They’d brought my trunk from the depot, and what a final sound that thump was.

  Then Grandma said in a thoughtful voice, “And you better settle in too, girl. Or I’ll butter your paws.”

  I just sat there without a sigh left in me. But I was past bawling now as Grandma began to edge out of her chair. “How about some supper? My stomach’s flapping against my backbone,” she said. “If I don’t eat, I
get cranky.”

  And heaven knows, we couldn’t have that.

  GRANDMA DOWDEL’S STORY CONTINUES IN:

  A Season of Gifts

  “Peck affectionately nails small town life and the spirit of giving.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Warm and funny family fare.”

  —The Boston Globe

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